Dennitza, they concentrate on the eastern seaboard of Rodna, the main
continent, in the northern hemisphere. Because they can stand cold
better than humans, they do most of the fishing, pelagiculture, et
cetera."
"Nevertheless, I presume considerable cultural blending has taken
place."
"Certainly--"
Recollection rushed in of Trohdwyr, who died on Diomedes whither she was
bound; of her father on horseback, a-gallop against a windy autumn
forest, and the bugle call he blew which was an immemorial Merseian
war-song; of her mother cuddling her while she sang an Eriau lullaby,
"Dwynafor, dwynafor, odhal tiv," and then laughing low, "But you, little
sleepyhead, you have no tail, do you?"; of herself and Mihail in an
ychan boat on the Black Ocean, snowfall, ice floes, a shout as a sea
beast magnificently broached to starboard; moonlit gravbelt flight over
woods, summer air streaming past her cheeks, a campfire glimpsed, a
landing among great green hunters, their gruff welcome; and, "I'm not
hungry," Kossara said, and left the saloon before Chives or, worse,
Flandry should see her weep.
V
-
Flandry's office, if that was the right name for it, seemed curiously
spare amidst the sybaritic arrangements Kossara had observed elsewhere
aboard. She wondered what his private quarters were like. But don't ask.
He might take that as an invitation. Seated in front of the desk behind
which he was, she made her gaze challenge his.
"I know this will be painful to you," he said. "You've had a few days to
rest, though, and we must go through with it. You see, the team that
'probed you appears to have made every imaginable blunder and maybe
created a few new ones." She must have registered her startlement, for
he continued, "Do you know how a hypnoprobe works?"
Bitterness rose in her. "Not really," she said. "We have no such vile
thing on Dennitza."
"I don't approve either. But sometimes desperation dictates." Flandry
leaned back in his chair, ignited a cigarette, regarded her out of eyes
whose changeable gray became the hue of a winter overcast. His tone
remained soft: "Let me explain from the ground up. Interrogation is an
unavoidable part of police and military work. You can do it on several
levels of intensity. First, simple questioning; if possible, questioning
different subjects separately and comparing their stories. Next,
browbeating of assorted kinds. Then torture, which can be the crude
inflicting of pain or something like prolonged sleep deprivation. The
trouble with these methods is, they aren't too dependable. The subject
may hold out. He may lie. If he's had psychosomatic training, he can
fool a lie detector; or, if he's clever, he can tell only a misleading
part of the truth. At best, procedures are slow, especially when you
have to crosscheck whatever you get against whatever other information
you can find.
"So we move on to narcoquiz, drugs that damp the will to resist. Problem
here is, first, you often get idiosyncratic reactions or nonreactions.
People vary a lot in their body chemistry, especially these days when
most of humanity has lived for generations or centuries on worlds that
aren't Terra. And, of course, each nonhuman species is a whole separate
bowl of spaghetti. Then, second, your subject may have been immunized
against everything you have in your medicine chest. Or he may have been
deep-conditioned, in which case no drug we know of will unlock his
mind."
Between the shoulderblades, Kossara's back hurt from tension. "What
about telepathy?" she snapped.
"Often useful but always limited," Flandry said. "Neural radiations have
a low rate of information conveyance. And the receiver has to know the
code the sender is using. For instance, if I were a telepath, and you
concentrated on thinking in Serbic, I'd be as baffled as if you spoke
aloud. Or worse, because individual thought patterns vary tremendously,
especially in species like ours which don't normally employ telepathy. I
might learn to read your mind--slowly, awkwardly, incompletely at
best--but find that everybody else's was transmitting gibberish as far
as I was concerned. Interspecies telepathy involves still bigger
difficulties. And we know tricks for combatting any sort of brain
listener. A screen worn on the head will heterodyne the outgoing
radiation in a random fashion, make it absolutely undecipherable. Or,
again, training, or deep conditioning, can be quite effective."
He paused. Wariness crossed his mobile countenance. "There are
exceptions to everything," he murmured, "including what I've said. Does
the name Aycharaych mean anything to you?"
"No," she answered honestly. "Why?"
"No matter now. Perhaps later."
"I am a xenologist," Kossara reminded him. "You've told me nothing new."
"Eh? Sorry. Unpredictable what somebody else does or does not know about
the most elementary things, in a universe where facts swarm like gnats.
Why, I was thirty years old before I learned what the Empress Theodora
used to complain about."
She stared past his smile. "You were going to describe the hypnoprobe."
He sobered. "Yes. The final recourse. Direct electronic attack on the
brain. On a molecular level, bypassing drugs, conditionings, anything.
Except--the subject can have been preconditioned, in his whole organism,
to die when this happens. Shock reaction. If the interrogation team is
prepared, it can hook him into machines that keep the vital processes
going, and so have a fair chance of forcing a response. But his mind
won't survive the damage."
He ground his cigarette hard against the lip of an ash-taker before
letting the stub be removed. "You weren't in that state, obviously." His
voice roughened. "In fact, you had no drug immunization. Why weren't you
narcoed instead of 'probed? Or were you, to start with?"
"I don't remember--" Astounded, Kossara exclaimed, "How do you know?
About me and drugs, I mean? I didn't myself!"
"The slave dealer's catalogue. His medic ran complete cytological
analyses. I put the data through a computer. It found you've had
assorted treatments to resist exotic conditions, but none of the traces
a psychimmune would show."
Flandry shook his head, slowly back and forth. "An overzealous
interrogator might order an immediate 'probe, instead of as a last
resort," he said. "But why carry it out in a way that wiped your
associated memories? True, such things do happen occasionally. For
instance, a particular subject might have a low threshold of tolerance;
the power level might then be too high, and disrupt the RNA molecules as
they come into play under questioning. As a rule, though, permanent
psychological effects--beyond those which bad experiences generally
leave--are rare. A competent team will test the subject beforehand and
establish the parameters."
He sighed. "Well, the civil war and aftermath lopped a lot off the top,
in my Corps too. Coprolite-brained charact
ers who'd ordinarily have been
left in safe routineering assignments were promoted to fill vacancies.
Maybe you had the bad luck to encounter a bunch of them."
"I am not altogether sorry to have forgotten," Kossara mumbled.
Flandry stroked his mustache. "Ah ... you don't think you've suffered
harm otherwise?"
"I don't believe so. I can reason as well as ever. I remember my life in
detail till shortly before I left for Diomedes, and I'm quite clear
about everything since they put me aboard ship for Terra."
"Good." Flandry's warmth seemed genuine. "There are enough unnecessary
horrors around, without a young and beautiful woman getting annulled."
He rescued me from the slime pit, she thought. He has shown me every
kindness and courtesy. Thus far. He admits--his purpose is to preserve
the Empire.
"What pieces do you recall, Kossara?" Flandry had not used her first
name before.
She strained fingers against each other. Her pulse beat like a trapped
bird. No. Don't bring them back. The fear, the hate, the beloved dead.
"You see," he went on, "I'm puzzled as to why Dennitza should turn
against us. Your Gospodar supported Hans, and was rewarded with
authority over his entire sector. Granted, that's laid a terrible work
load on him if he's conscientious. But it gives him--his people--a major
say in the future of their region. A dispute about the defense
mechanisms for your home system and its near neighbors ... well, that's
only a dispute, isn't it, which he may still have some hope of winning.
Can't you give me a better reason for him to make trouble? Isn't a
compromise possible?"
"Not with the Imperium!" Kossara said out of upward-leaping rage.
"Between you and me, at least? Intellectually? Won't you give me your
side of the story?"
Kossara's blood ebbed. "I ... well, speaking for myself, the fighting
cost me the man I was going to marry. What use an Empire that can't keep
the Pax?"
"I'm sorry. But did any mortal institution ever work perfectly? Hans is
trying to make repairs. Besides, think. Why would the Gospodar--if he
did plan rebellion--why would he send you, a girl, his niece, to
Diomedes?"
She summoned what will and strength she had left, closed her eyes,
searched back through time.
{Bodin Miyatovich was a big man, trim and erect in middle age. He bore
the broad, snub-nosed, good-looking family face, framed in graying
dark-blond hair and close-cropped beard, tanned and creased by a
lifetime of weather. He eyes were beryl. Today he wore a red cloak over
brown tunic and breeks, gromatz leather boots, customary knife and
sidearm sheathed on a silver-studded belt.
Dyavo-like, he paced the sun deck which jutted from the Zamok. In gray
stone softened by blossoming creepers, that ancestral castle reared
walls, gates, turrets, battlements, wind-blown banners (though the
ultimate fortress lay beneath, carved out of living rock) above steep
tile roofs and pastel-tinted half-timbered stucco of Old Town houses.
Thence Zorkagrad sloped downward; streets changed from twisty lanes to
broad boulevards; traffic flitted around geometrical buildings raised in
modern materials by later generations. Waterborne shipping crowded docks
and bay. Lake Stoyan stretched westward over the horizon, deep blue
dusted with glitter cast from a cloudless heaven. Elsewhere beyond the
small city, Kossara could from this height see cultivated lands along
the shores: green trees, hedges, grass, and yellowing grain of Terran
stock; blue or purple where native foliage and pasture remained; homes,
barns, sheds, sunpower towers, widely spaced; a glimpse of the Lyubisha
River rolling from the north as if to bring greeting from her father's
manse. Closer by, the Elena flowed eastward, oceanward; barges plodded
and boats danced upon it. Here in the middle of the Kazan, she could not
see the crater walls which those streams clove. But she had a sense of
them, ramparts against glacier and desert, a chalice of warmth and
fertility.
A breeze embraced her, scented by flowers, full of the sweet songs of
guslars flitting ruddy to and from their nests in the vines. She sat
back in her chair and thought, guilty at doing so, what a pity to spend
such an hour on politics.
Her uncle's feet slammed the planks. "Does Molitor imagine we'll never
get another Olaf or Josip on the throne?" the Gospodar rumbled. "A clown
or a cancer ... and, once more, Policy Board, Admiralty, civil service
bypassed, or terrorized, or corrupted. If we rely on the Navy for our
whole defense, what defense will we have against future foolishness or
tyranny? Let the foolishness go too far, and we'll have no defense at
all."
ventured.
Bodin spat an oath. "How much of a unified command is possible, in
practical fact, on an interstellar scale? Every fleet admiral is a
potential war lord. Shall we keep nothing to set against him?" He
stopped. His fist thudded on a rail. "Molitor trusts nobody. That's
what's behind this. So why should I trust him?"
He turned about. His gaze smoldered at her. "Besides," he said, slowly,
far down in his throat, "the time may come ... the time may not be far
off ... when we need another civil war."}
"No--" she whispered. "I can't remember more than ... resentment among
many. The Narodna Voyska has been a, a basic part of our society, ever
since the Troubles. Squadron and regimental honors, rights, chapels,
ceremonies--I'd stand formation on my unit's parade ground at sunset--us
together, bugle calls, volley, pipes and drums, and while the flag came
down, the litany for those of our dead we remembered that day--and often
tears would run over my cheeks, even in winter when they froze."
Flandry smiled lopsidedly. "Yes, I was a cadet once." He shook himself a
bit. "Well. No doubt your militia intertwines with a lot of civilian
matters, social and economic. For instance, I'd guess it doubles as
constabulary in some areas, and is responsible for various public works,
and--yes. Disbanding it would disrupt a great deal of your lives, on a
practical as well as emotional level. His Majesty may not appreciate
this enough. Germania doesn't contain your kind of society, and though
he's seen a good many others, between us, I wouldn't call him a terribly
imaginative man.
"Still, I repeat, negotiations have not been closed. And whatever their
upshot, don't you yourself have the imagination to see he means well?
Why this fanatical hatred of yours? And how many Dennitzans share it?"
"I don't know," Kossara said. "But personally, after what men of the
Empire did to, to people I care about--and later to me--"
"May I ask you to describe what you recall?" Flandry answered. She
glared defiance. "You see, if nothing else, maybe I'll find out, and be
able to prove to their superiors, those donnickers rate punishment for
aggravated stupidity."
He picked up a sheaf of papers on his
desk and riffled them. The report
on me must have violated my privacy more than I could ever do myself,
she thought in sudden weariness. All right, let me tell him what little
I can.
{A cave in the mountains near Salmenbrok held the sparse gear which kept
her and her fellows alive. They stood around her on a ledge outside, but
except for Trohdwyr shadowy, no real faces or names upon them any more.
Cliffs and crags loomed in darkling solidity, here and there a gnarled
tree or a streak of snow tinged pink by a reddish sun high in a purple
heaven. The wind thrust slow, strong, chill; it had not only an odor but
a taste like metal. A cataract, white and green half a kilometer away,
boomed loud through thick air that also shifted the pitch and timbre of
every sound. Huddled in her parka, she felt how Diomedes drew on her
more heavily than Dennitza, nearly two kilograms added to every ten.
Eonan of the Lannachska poised almost clear in her mind. Yellow eyes
aglow, wings unfurled for departure, he said in his shrill-accented
Anglic: "You understand, therefore, how these things strike at the very
life of my folk? And thus they touch our whole world. We thought the
wars between Flock and Fleet were long buried. Now they stir again--"
(Both moons were aloft and near the full, copper-colored, twice the
seeming size of Mesyatz (or Luna), one slow, one hasty across a sky
where few stars blinked and those in alien constellations. The night
cold gnawed. Flames sputtered and sparked. Their light fetched Trohdwyr
from darkness, where he sat on feet and tail in the cave mouth, roasting
meat from the ration box. The smoke bore a sharp aroma. He said to